Hong Kong Films: A Five-Fortune Panel, All My Good Karma Gone, and Now I'm Haunted

After transmigrating to Hong Kong in the 1980s, Fang Cheng binds himself to a Fate Panel. His only outstanding stat is Virtue, at a whopping 50. He steels himself, drops his Virtue to zero, and puts every point into romance and health. The very next day, he starts seeing ghosts.

At a fortune-telling stall on Temple Street, Blind Uncle Chen tells him as he counts on his fingers, "When a person exhausts their virtue, every move they make draws demons and obstacles." A little ghost who died thirty years ago comes looking for him to play ball in the stairwell. A woman in a red dress walks right through his body at the night market. Old antiques with no known owners grow hot in his palm. He can sense the remnants of virtue clinging to them, and absorb them by touch.

From then on, he spends his days getting beaten up as a stunt double on the Shaw Brothers set and his nights hunting for burial goods at the Temple Street night market to earn virtue. He builds his Fortune stat up to 20 and flips a late-Qing vase he found for thirteen thousand. But every point he adds to Virtue doubles how often he encounters the supernatural. When the Virtue stat on his panel finally ticks back up to a certain number, Fang Cheng looks in the mirror and sees an old woman in burial clothes standing behind him, grinning at him. The shape of her mouth is unmistakable: You're finally able to see me.

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.